Rejecting Religion Openly, and Being Polite About It

Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 at
2:47:00

It’s the million dollar question. You live in a world where almost everybody believes in a story that you do not. Besides the fact that societies are built around these stories, so are people’s most intimate hopes and fears. You don’t want to be silent about the way that you see the world, but at the same time you hate being rude.

So why challenge religion openly? I may take a round-about route, but in the following article I’ll try to at least give my own answer.

I don’t like getting shit upon.

In this way I am not unique. People generally prefer not to be oppressed, harassed, diminished, or abused; especially when it’s because of some aspect of their person that cannot be controlled. We all know that it’s wrong to revile an individual for their skin colour or handicap, precisely because those descriptives have been with them since birth.

I don’t believe in God. (or anything supernatural for that matter)

In this way I am also not unique, although I’m certainly not in the majority. Statistics regarding the prevalence of atheism vary depending on the source, but it remains clear that theism (belief in a god or gods) is the primary lens through which mankind sees the world. It’s a viewpoint so prevalent and so cherished that those who reject it might be the most universally loathed minority in modern history.

Most of us know the results of the 2007 Gallup poll which says that fewer Americans would vote for an atheist (45%) than for any other minority; including homosexuals (55%) and the thrice-married (67%); and far fewer than for any religious group. (Jews at 92%). Or the 2006 report that told us that “atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups.”*

Anecdotally, most atheists will tell you they learned to keep their opinions quiet, at least for some period of their lives, thanks to interpersonal feedback. I’ve certainly been loudly dismissed by otherwise polite people once my lack of beliefs was revealed to them.

People seem willing to respect you no matter which god you worship, just so long as you worship one of them. Otherwise—unlike they would with any other minority—many people are quite comfortable telling you to your face that you’re less of a human being. Just ask Jessica Ahlquist.

All these factors have a chilling effect, making the accurate counting of non-believers very difficult. This despite some hints that it may be the fastest growing way of looking at the world, and in America, more populous than any of the minorities listed above.

Recently however, what was once a fractured and silent population of non-believers has begun to speak up. Unlike theism, where the god you believe in typically depends on the culture you come from, non-believers can pop up in any of these cultures, and on any part of the globe. It’s certainly no surprise therefore that the internet is the best place to find them. From all over the world faithless people are sharing their thoughts and being heard, (although sometimes using pseudonyms) making fertile ground for movements like the new atheism, skeptical activism, secular-humanist political groups, etc.

Like myself, I imagine not a single one of these heathens decided to abandon their faith. In fact, I’m not sure people are capable of deciding what to believe in the first place. One can make choices to insulate themselves against ways of thinking, surely. Self delusion sometimes takes work. But the idea that non-theists should ‘turn off’ their skepticism is simply a silly one. While I imagine that different people come to reject faith for different reasons, a lack of credulity most certainly has to be among them; a trait that, like skin colour, we’re probably born with a certain amount of.

To quote Popeye; “I am what I is.” Kinda sucks to be hated for it.

But while I’m willing to bet that I’m an atheist at a genetic level, I’m not sure how much of an anti-theist I’d consider myself to be. To put it more simply, while I don’t believe in God, I don’t think my job is to convince anyone else of the same. Well, maybe a little bit. Let me go on.

On Twitter I’ve been a repeated witness to fellow unbelievers chasing down and harassing people of faith. They scour through religious hashtags looking for anyone saying something bad (or inarticulate) about atheists, and then set to work on them 140 characters at a time. (You know who you are) Soon their atheist buddies join in, and it invariably becomes an evening-long flame war between the the faithful and the faithless.

This is a tactic I don’t fully understand. I guess some folks just like a good donnybrook, and I suppose that thousands of years of persecution gives a suddenly empowered populace of atheists some licence to be bitter. However exactly what is it that they hope to achieve by aggressively attacking the religious? We all know how hard it is to change another person’s beliefs, and let’s not just assume out of hand that it’s even ethical to try to do so if you could.**

It’s a fine line, but there’s a difference between standing up for what you believe in and tearing down the beliefs of others; perhaps for no other reason than because it’s rude. Since this blog was conceived not as a way to speak to the masses, but rather to introduce a little bit of skepticism and critical thinking to the people in my immediate sphere, it’s important for me to co-exist with those people. Some of my readers are relgious friends and family, and I’m not so much of a crusader to trade their feelings for pursuit of an agenda.

My goal is not to mock or punch holes in anybody else’s way of seeing the world, but simply to make sure the world makes room for mine.

Many have made the case that religion is a detriment to society, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find that notion compelling. But even if it’s true, is religion the biggest threat our civilization currently faces? Is the threat of climate change not worse? Or poverty? Peak Oil? Nuclear arms?

Not that we shouldn’t try to solve smaller problems while we solve the big ones, but might there be some other motivation at play, which skews our priorities as rationalists?

Could it be that free-thinkers focus so heavily on religious beliefs thanks primarily to an overgrown sense of rejection? Of anger over being an outcast? Is their desire to diminish religion disproportionate to any pragmatic reason for doing so? And if that’s the case, then just how rational are we being?

What needs to end first is not intolerance among believers, but rather the silence of non-believers. Once the latter is commonplace, the former should take care of itself. We don’t need to diminish the religious, and we don’t need to throw our lack of belief in everybody’s face. We just need to be open.

We need to change our religion to ‘atheist’ or ‘agnostic’ on our Facebook profiles, whether Aunt Clara can see it or not. We need to not shy away from answering ‘atheist’ whenever the topic comes up in polite conversation at dinner parties.*** We need to be at least as comfortable discussing our beliefs as religious people do theirs, in every sphere of discourse.

By doing so people think you’re saying they’re stupid for believing in God, or that you think you’re smarter than everyone else. This is an unfortunate side effect of holding a minority opinion, but that doesn’t mean we stop being who we are for everybody else’s sake. What we say has to fly in their faces a little bit, simply by the nature of the argument. But the goal should remain only to be heard and counted, not to win a war of ideas.

Remember the homosexual example, and their successful (but ongoing) ascension towards acceptance in society. (below) Imagine how much more difficult their struggle would be if it were perceived that they were trying to make everyone else gay too. Remember the very reason that ‘pride’ is the word they use to encapsulate their movement. The more open and expressive a group of people are, the more difficult it is for the general populace to marginalize them.

Why? Because by being open the true numbers of that group can be counted, and more importantly, can impact the day-to-day lives of average people. By coming out in significant numbers, more people can say “I have a cousin who’s gay”, or “My niece is an atheist”. That’s the way a political climate is created, so that acceptance of a group is not begrudgingly done, but is instead unavoidable.

By simply stating who we are, so everyone can hear us, and avoiding the pitfalls of endless debate on the specifics of what we believe; we create the landscape on which tolerance for the non-religious can exist.

That’s the way each individual atheist avoids getting shit on. By being part of a vocal, proud, and mutually supportive whole; a group to whom it’s no longer socially acceptable to be rude.

**Listen, I know all the counter arguments to this notion, but you have to at least admit that it’s not an easily answered question. I don’t want to suggest that we should ‘bend over backwards’, as Dawkins puts it, to preserve the faith of others. But aggressively attempting to destroy the faith of others seems like a different beast to me.

Great article, Brad. Many good points. I will point out a thought of mine when reading your take on the biggest threats to our society. I submit it’s nuclear weapons in the hands of people who believe there’s a better life after this one. Besides waging total war, the only people on Earth who’d be willing to use nuclear weapons are people willing to wipe out others because of hatred. And as far as I’m concerned, the only way you can hate someone you don’t know so much so as to kill them, is to dehumanize them. Apart from the Nazis, revolution in China, Russia, or socioeconomic genocides in Africa, religion is the only path to that kind of hatred.We can have all the nukes and means of destruction at our disposal, but true believers are the ones willing to bring death to anyone who disagrees.Beyond a long history of death and destruction, religion seeks to give the masses simple answers to complex questions. It numbs the minds of millions and lowers the bar for progress. It deflates the hopes of those of us who seek knowledge and an explanation for why and how we exist, based on scientific process and evidence and facts. Religion seeks to convince people that we’ll never explain our own existence. It’s a lie. Time, technology and our human intelligence is more than enough to explain anything and everything. We don’t need simple answers. We can handle the truth.It’s hard to understand our place in the cosmos and more than anything, religion seeks to convince insignificant beings that they’re special -that they have exclusive keys to unlock a door to an existence better than this one. And that they get those keys by doing nothing more than believing in fairy tales for adults.The belief in a second chance has poisoned our planet because too many people think this life is just a stepping stone. Though there’s not a single shred of evidence to support it, desperate people convince themselves they’re going to heaven. They’re convinced of a perfect and magical alternative existence where nobody lives to solve any problems. Frankly, an afterlife with no strife, disagreements, conflicts, challenges, obstacles or troubles is just lazy, weak, and pathetic. Basically, religion tells us to pat ourselves on the back for graduating to an existence where you’re fucking useless for the rest of eternity.Religion needs to go away and people need to grow up and live the only existence they’ll ever have. People need to except that the universe is complicated and that anybody offering an easy answer is simply full of shit.

Hi Brad, I wasn’t trying to refute your argument. I agree with most of it. My take is that we should be more than vocal at this point, though. I think religion is a threat to our planet and that anybody who believes in fairy tales should be challenged. The way I look at it, religion is a mental illness. Believing in something that’s patently false, worshiping imaginary figures, talking animals, magic boats, or the belief we’re all defended from two humans 6000 years ago… It’s delusional and by my measure, it’s straight up crazy.I do think we need to be more than just counted and heard. I think that the world we live in needs a rapid change in thinking among the masses in order to solve our problems and prevent destruction on a scale unimaginable only 100 years ago. Exhibit A: Iran.The problem for me is that people who buy into values from 2000 years ago still seek power and influence and if they get it, they’ll continue a mission to prescribe it, fund it and install it by any means necessary. They’re relentless and you can’t reason with them and no amount of evidence to the contrary will sway their opinions. Again, it’s mental illness from where I stand and I don’t want certifiable people in my government, in our courts or in positions of influence.I agree with most of your argument, but I think we’re well overdue for more than just being heard and counted. Our world is in desperate need of critical thinkers with faith not in a belief system, but scientific process and the observation of and reaction to evidence.I fear that just being a recognized and tolerated minority isn’t enough. The clock is ticking and people need to stop wasting their time, energy and money on false gods, and lies about some magical existence beyond this one.

Hi @chrismarriott – Ok, so it’s important to understand that this post was not meant as an olive branch to religion, nor a suggestion that it’s not dangerous. As I mentioned, I agree with a lot of your fears. What I describe in this article however is a strategy for dealing with them.But before I get into that, allow me to just veer off a second and paste in what I talked about on Reddit yesterday, because I think it matters. Religion is so tightly interwoven into the fabric of society that’s it’s easy to draw lines between it and other problems, and even easier to suggest that it could be a causal agent. However maybe we would have had these problems if their were no religion in the first place. Maybe man’s general talent for deluding himself is the issue, no matter what those delusions are. Or maybe not. The problem is that have no way to know, because we only have the existing network of cultures to examine. There’s just no evidence to suggest that by eradicating religion NOW we would solve any of the other problems I mentioned, only a lot of guess work. If we could go back in time and prevent theism? Maybe then we’d see some of these other issues blink out of existence. However in a world where some of them create a clear and present danger, I’d love to see skeptical minds focus less on the low hanging fruit of religion, and more on what really ails us.I could have added that a lot of atheists use the ‘slippery slope’ logical fallacy quite liberally when it comes to religion. The idea that "If we allow religion to continue, one day a fundamentalist will get the bomb." I’m not here to say that this isn’t a danger, but is it in any way certain? Or more dangerous than the other problems I mentioned? We have to take care not to let alarmism enter too deeply into our thoughts, lest we use it as a justification for an ‘any means necessary’ approach to our cause.But none of that was the argument I was trying to get at in the article. That is this: No internet atheist is going to convince the fundamentalists of this world away from their world view. Speak up as much as you like, as long as you constitute a hated and marginalized minority, your words will fall on deaf ears, and the world will go on exactly as is has. In order to make even a tenth of the changes you’d like to see what we desperately need is representation in leadership.We do have time. The key is to out-survive those bad ideas, and to create a world in which our children can run for important positions in government without faith. We can yell and scream as much as we like, but the smarter long-game is to increase the intolerance for magical thinking in public debate, not just in internet forums.That’s why I’m disappointed in private or ‘internet-only’ atheists who hide their thoughts from family and friends, because they’re missing out on the only real opportunity they have to make a difference in this battle – to create tolerance for atheism in their very own spheres.The way I see it, this ‘war of ideas’ cannot be won in this generation, but in the one or two generations that follow? That might, if we play our cards right, be a different story.

This was a good read. I particularly liked the example of homosexuals wanting to be accepted and how much more of a furore it would have caused if it was discovered they were trying to change people to their orientation too. I mean…that’s really hit the nail on the head in describing the usual tact a lot of atheist/agnostics, including myself, have been guilty of. I’m always open to learning a lesson and I think that helped teach me something so thankyou. I’d much rather not believing be just another option due to numbers than being twisted into some kind of hatred towards humanity because of the general attitudes of non-believers. The example of the poor girl in America though….what form of Christianity involves curb stomping and calling people a c**t? I think that particular example is more about the general ignorance of American Christians and the sheep mentality of the general American population….reknowned the world over for being extremely dangerously stupid and ignorant and somehow able to justify immense levels of evil behind their faith. You may take offence in that, but hey, maybe the smart Americans need to make themselves heard more ;)I wonder what other characteristics atheists/agnostics would share with each other? I imagine, such as myself, that they still want to be good people and live good lives. Rather than shirking religion so they can be evil without consequence.

@m3dia Thanks so much for your response. The part where you said "I’m always open to learning a lesson and I think that helped teach me something so thank you" kind of floored me. Made me think about how seldom we hear people say things like that, and I really appreciate you taking the time to do so.As for the question of America, we also have to keep in mind that these were kids we’re talking about. Kids are enormously cruel no matter what country they come from, especially when trying to preserve their own place in a social pecking order.Just thought I should point that out, although your point is well taken.